Student Tips Called Key To Avert Violence

Like most of the school shooters before him, Charles Andrew Williams
apparently made no secret of his desire to open fire on his classmates.
In fact, the Santee, Calif., youth reportedly invited several friends
to join him in the shooting spree last week at Santana High School that
left two students dead.

Revelations that the bloody scene might have been prevented if word
of Mr. Williams' dark musings had only reached the right adults
troubled violence- prevention experts and school officials around the
country.

"It's just déjà vu—I've been there, done that,
seen that," said Bill J. Bond, the principal of Heath High School in
West Paducah, Ky., where three students died and five others were
wounded in December 1997 after a 14-year-old freshman opened fire into
a circle of praying students.

"In order for us, the principals, to really protect kids, kids have
to help us—because it's the kids who know," Mr. Bond said. "In my
case in Paducah, 12 kids saw that gun, and no one came forward."

Mr. Williams, a freshman at the 1,900-student high school 10 miles
north of San Diego, had told at least one adult that he was going to
take a gun to school, according to subsequent accounts. And several
friends said they unsuccessfully searched him for a weapon before the
start of classes on Monday of last week. But no one took the
15-year-old seriously enough to report his threats to school or
law-enforcement officials.

"He was telling us how he was going to bring a gun to school, but we
thought he was just joking," Santana High student Neil O'Grady, 15,
told CNN. "We were like, 'Yeah, right.'"

But Mr. Williams wasn't joking. At about 9:20 a.m. on March 5, he
allegedly started shooting in a school restroom with a .22-caliber
revolver smuggled into the building in his backpack. The gun belonged
to his father.

In the few minutes it took San Diego County sheriff's deputies to
reach him, 15 people were shot. In addition to the two students who
died, 11 teenagers and two staff members were injured. Classes resumed
on March 7, the same day that Mr. Williams, who faces being tried as an
adult, made his first appearance in court.

Authorities ordered heightened security at the school on March 8
after several student saw a message posted on a chat line that
threatened "to finish what Andy began," according to a San Diego County
Sheriff's Department spokesman.

Telling on Friends

The explosion of violence at Santana High School was the latest in a
series of schoolhouse shootings that have rocked suburban and rural
communities across the country in recent years. It was the worst such
episode since the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in
Jefferson County, Colo., in which two teenagers shot and killed 12
fellow students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.
("A Colo.
Community Looks for Answers After Deadly Attack," April 28, 1999,
and "Colorado
District Copes Amid Grief, Fear," May 5, 1999.)

Though law-enforcement officials have warned against forming a
profile of the "school shooter," the descriptions last week of the
Santana High student known as "Andy" to his friends were eerily
familiar: male, slight of build, a target of bullies, a teenage outcast
relegated to the fringes of high school culture.

And like others before him, Mr. Williams reportedly aired his plans
for violence before he showed up in school with a gun.

The FBI calls it "leakage." Young people contemplating violence
often reveal thoughts and fantasies to those around them that serve as
clues. Getting wind of those "leaks" is critical in enabling schools
and police to head off potential tragedies, but teenagers have proved
to be reluctant informers.

In a recent review of 37 school shootings, the U.S. Secret Service
found that the teenage gunmen in nearly three-quarters of the cases had
told someone—a friend, a classmate, or sibling—about their
interest in mounting such an attack. ("All Threats Aren't Equal, FBI
Cautions," Sept. 13, 2000.)

Better than half had told more than one person. In one instance, an
attacker made comments to at least 24 friends and classmates about
killing other students. But the report said only rarely did anyone
report the threats.

Persuading young people to talk to adults—especially if it
means snitching on a friend—is no easy task, experts say, and
school officials will have to work hard to win their trust.

"There is a long history in youth culture of seeing adults as
adversaries, and keeping secrets from adults and not ratting on your
friends," said James Garbarino, the author of the 1999 book Lost
Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How WeCan Save Them and
the director of the Family Life Development Center at Cornell
University in Ithaca, N.Y. "Kids need to feel confident that if they
come forward, their friends will be helped, and not just punished.
Schools need to make sure every kid hears that message."

Even when school officials are clear about their policies, however,
students still may feel they alone shoulder the responsibility for
deciding whether a threat is serious.

Evan F. Kuehn, 16, a junior at the 1,500-student Yorktown High
School in Arlington, Va., learned the hard way about the consequences
of keeping quiet when one of his friends attempted suicide last year.
The boy had constantly spoken of killing himself and was often
depressed, but friends didn't think the problem was serious enough to
tell an adult.

"It didn't seem to me he would take action on it," Mr. Kuehn
recalled. "I thought, 'He just gets into bad moods sometimes, and I'll
just try to be a good friend.' "

Mr. Kuehn still isn't sure he would turn to an
adult—especially a teacher or principal. "If you think about it
hypothetically," he said, "I guess you should always be too careful,
and you should say something, but it's hard."

Russell J. Skiba, an associate professor of education and the
director of the federally financed Safe and Responsible Schools Program
at Indiana University Bloomington, said the barriers that prevent
youths from trusting authority figures are many and formidable.
Teenagers' fear of retaliation by their peers and their resentment for
what they view as stifling, adult-imposed rules keep them silent, he
said.

Possibly compounding the problem, Mr. Skiba suggested, are the tough
responses many schools have adopted to even the mildest-seeming
threats.

"There is an overwhelming sense of 'us and them,' and 'the
administration doesn't understand us, and they're just out to enforce
meaningless rules.' Even the kids who are school leaders feel this
way," he said. "Zero-tolerance policies probably exacerbate this. Kids
rely on us to react wisely in these situations, but as they look around
the country, I think they see adults acting rather
foolishly."

Getting the Message

The good news, many officials say, is that some students are coming
forward.

In the aftermath of the Santee shooting, police arrested at least
eight students at five Southern California schools for planning similar
attacks after students tipped off authorities.

Laura M. Comeau, who is a freshman at Yorktown High in Virginia and
part of Mr. Kuehn's circle of friends, said she's learned not to take
any chances. "It's important to tell an adult, because you can never
tell when someone is joking," the 14-year-old said. "We all feel safe
at Yorktown, but it could happen anywhere."

Nationally, school officials have gone to great lengths to make
students feel secure. The Columbine tragedy focused intense public
interest on the issue of school safety and spurred government agencies
and districts to invest heavily in violence prevention. Santana High
School was apparently no different.

Last year, the 22,000- student Grossmont school district, which
includes Santana High, received $1.1 million in state safe-schools
funding. And like other California school systems, it employed safety
officers and counselors, provided peer-mediation and
conflict-resolution education, and encouraged students to report
violent threats made by their peers.

"From a planning standpoint and a programmatic standpoint, they were
well-prepared," said Bill White, the administrator of the California
education department's Safe Schools and Violence Prevention Program.
"If one kid had gone to the administration, all our programs would look
like a success."

In the end, though, the district's efforts weren't enough to ward
off last week's violent incident. That has led some experts to conclude
that too little attention is being paid to teaching children how to
communicate.

Beyond Metal Detectors

"We need to get beyond the metal detectors to put a human face on
school safety, and get people to talk— the earlier the better,"
said Stephen R. Sroka, a retired Cleveland teacher and an adjunct
professor at Case Western Reserve University's Center for Adolescent
Health.

"Kids know more about what's going on [than adults], but the problem
is we have this culture where you can't snitch or rat on somebody,"
said Mr. Sroka, who conducts crisis-intervention seminars around the
country and was scheduled to visit Santana High School this spring.
"The research shows elementary school kids can mediate, so we need to
teach them at a young age to talk it out, rather than hit it out."

If schools hope to break teenagers' unwritten code of silence,
experts say, they will have to convince them that they will be
protected if they report threats or other problems, and that the
information they provide will be acted on quickly and with
compassion.

"First, adults need to get across [to students] that it's not
ratting on friends, but it's a matter of taking responsibility for
their own safety," said Joanne McDaniel, the acting director of the
Center for the Prevention of School Violence in Raleigh, N.C. "But
there's also a fear of retaliation, and adults need to create safe
avenues of reporting for students. There needs to be a mechanism in
place and then that needs to be made known to everyone."

But hot lines for anonymous tips are no substitute for caring
relationships between adults and young people, Ms. McDaniel
advised.

"It's really a personal approach," she said. "We have to be
persistent and reach out and make sure every student in a school feels
like there's an adult who cares about them."

From Salon.com:
"Deadly
Ambivalence," March 6, 2001. Author Meredith Maran discusses the
Santee shooting and says "the burning question" is not why it
happened, but what Americans are willing to do about it;
and
"Is There Anything Left To Say?," March 6, 2001, asks author
Daryl Lindsey. "Apparently, not much." In this article, Salon.com
rounds up a collection of their recent articles that address issues
revived by the school shooting in Santee. Topics include gun control,
apathy and child neglect, and bullying in schools.

Report-it.com is an online,
non-emergency hotline that allows students to leave anonymous reports
of threats, violence, bullying, and drug abuse in their schools. Once a
tip is received, a school administrator is contacted, and the school
then conducts their own investigation. Report-it.com also maintains a
comprehensive list of help resources.

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